Brokedown Express

Jul 13, 2010, 9:00 PM EDT

Michael Ignatieff’s Liberal express bus got going – until it broke down outside of Hawksbury. And cue the assembled journalists trying to find meaning in mechanical failure. The CBC’s Rosemary Barton gave a bit of a hint of just what is happening on the bus (where Ignatieff is *gasp!* travelling with reporters). Hint: there may be sing-alongs…

Kady O’Malley names the absent Senators who allowed C-9 to pass. Gloria Galloway finds that most of them were in fact travelling, which is not uncommon for some of their committee work, and I’m sure that many of them had made the plans months in advance, before they knew the Senate would still be sitting this late into the summer.

Retired Supreme Court Justice Franc Iacobucci – remember him? He’s expected to be the expert jurist named by the Conservatives to the dispute resolution panel created as part of the compromise agreed to in setting up the ability for the MPs to see those Afghan detainee documents – while he’s still going through all those documents on behalf of the Minister of Justice. Oh, the tangled webs… No word yet on the Liberal or Bloc picks.

The NDP’s Glen Thibeault thinks we need to better fund soccer in this country if we ever want to have a chance of making it to the World Cup. Denis Coderre, a former sports minister, disagrees on the approach.

And women in Quebec will now be getting free fertility treatments when necessary. And I’m sure it has nothing to do with the fear in Quebec of the demographic time bomb, or their fears about the preservation of their language and culture when they’ve got a low birth rate.